High life

Gstaad My chalet lies far above the village of Gstaad, but I happened to be ‘en ville’ when I heard the pleasant sounds of an oompah band and saw the Swiss burghers dressed up in their finest Lederhosen marching through. It was a magnificent morning, the mountains glistening in the sun, the air fresh and clean, the kind of day Papa Hemingway could describe like no other. An elderly but very friendly American man asked me if a war had been declared. Nothing special, I told him, just the day the cows are brought down from their pastures up high. In America they call it fife and drums, which has a military angle to it, hence the question of the Yank, who was obviously joking.

Gstaad If the London Olympics do not go down in history as the Crying Games, I will perform a sex act on Vladimir Putin in Piccadilly Circus as the clock strikes 12 next New Year’s Eve. Olympic winners’ tears made the place look like Niagara Falls at times, and with the floods up in Scotland I feared for the safety of cattle and other animals. Winners cried much more than losers, which makes the Devil laugh, according to an old proverb, and makes me wonder what is happening to the Brits. Take, for example, the lightweight women’s double skulls. The event was won convincingly by two nice British girls who broke down and cried so much they had to sweep the place for tears in order for the medal ceremony to take place.

Thucydides carefully structured his Peloponnesian war history as a cautionary tale about the moral decay that accompanies abuses of imperial power. ‘It is a general law of nature to rule whatever one can,’ say the Athenians blandly to the denizens of Melos before slaughtering them. (The tiny island of Melos, a Spartan colony, had refused to join an alliance with Athens in 416 BC, so the civilised Athenians punished innocent civilians by killing all the men and selling the women and children into slavery.) Athens was a direct democracy, whereas Sparta was a militaristic oligarchy, yet it was Athens that abused her power once the great Pericles had died of the plague and was replaced by the demagogue and total hawk Cleon.

Gstaad  Purity in a sport does not mix with popularity, and defending the former is anathema to the hucksters, crooks and profiteers who make up the latter. In this I do not include the sportswriters of serious newspapers, with whom I actually sympathise. They see what’s going on, but they have to report on sport and there are, after all, libel laws to protect the guilty. In the birthplace of sport — where else but Greece — football is as rotten as anywhere on earth, except in places like Thailand, where betting comes first and sport second.

Gstaad  Mountains in summer are of an astral beauty, the snowy, far away, shrouded in cloud peaks like old men wearing spats. Danger lurks with such men, as it does with mountains. Colin Thubron wrote about a certain peak in Tibet, and claimed that the God of Death dwelled on that particular mountain. One could say that about many places. Only last week more than 11 people lost their lives on Mont Blanc, and the numbers will reach close to 100 by the time the summer’s over. The ancient Greeks thought the heart of the world was Mount Olympus. (Hades, of course, was the you know what of the world.) The icy lakes of mountains appeal to many as purifying. Hindus and Buddhists bathe in them, drink the water and carry it away.

Dare I encroach on James Delingpole’s TV territory and ask what has happened to Wimbledon? A crying jag in public would surely have embarrassed Baron von Cramm, a three-time losing finalist, not to mention Rod Laver, Roy Emerson and John Newcombe, all three multiple winners of the crown. Back in my time, Lew Hoad won it and I took him to Les Ambassadeurs nightclub, owned by John Mills, no relation to the actor. No one recognised him, which was fine with Lew. So he did the same in 1957, murdering Ashley Cooper in the process, and once again we went out and got smashed near Hyde Park Corner. No one, not even the women, cried back then, especially in public and on the telly. Angela Mortimer, Ann Jones, even Ginny Wade in the Jubilee Year, would not have dreamt of it.

The Spectator lost one of its most loyal readers when Alistair Londonderry, Marquess of, died recently of that most dreaded pancreatic cancer, the very same that had killed his brother-in-law Jimmy Goldsmith 15 years before. Alistair would have been 75 in September, an age that Jimmy never even got close to. Sir James once told me that Alistair had the best brain of anyone he knew, with almost encyclopedic knowledge of politics and music. Jimmy would ring him and casually ask in those pre-Google times who the vice-president of, say, Upper Volta, was. Back would come an unpronounceable name. Goldsmith would have his secretary check it and, presto, Alistair would yet again have come up trumps.

On Board S/Y Bushido, off Corsica  For the past three days I’ve been watching people aged 110 years old prancing around bareheaded under a sun so fierce no Taleban warrior would ever emerge from under his camel. I tried to speak to the captain of one of these megaships, but he mistook me for a reporter and looked quite nervous until I pointed towards Bushido and told him I was the owner. He looked a bit less nervous but remained suspicious as I had no bling on me and my clothes were not Dolce & Gabbana. He told me that these ‘ships’ are so perfect that they no longer pitch or roll in heavy seas, and the folk on board can dance to their heart’s delight even if there is a 10 Beaufort storm raging.

It is very still as I sit down to write, the atmosphere heavy and oppressive. They say time flies, but less so if one looks backwards. One thousand years before Constantinople fell to the Ottomans in 1453, Emperor Justinian was embarrassed to discover that his Greek subjects were not paying their taxes. Cheating officialdom has become a trademark of modern Greece, and is often attributed by philhellenes to the 400-year Turkish occupation, and subsequent Greek resistance. Not necessarily, says famed historian Taki. Byzantium’s government officials closely resemble Greek government agents of the present day. Two thirds of the revenues extorted from the taxpayers during Byzantium’s heyday never reached the Treasury.

On board S/Y Bushido I made a resolution long ago never to mention the Olympics — its spirit is on a par with that of Madame Claude, of Paris brothel infamy — but resolutions are made to be broken. With an uncle who competed in Los Angeles in 1932 and Berlin in 1936, and a father who ran the relay for Greece in Berlin, reading about American rappers and Indian steel tycoons carrying the torch reminds one just how much commerce has hijacked sport. One thing is for sure. I’m leaving London the day after The Spectator summer party in early July and staying as far away as possible. I enjoyed the Olympics in Athens in 2004, although the Games did play a part in the financial fiasco that followed.

On board S/Y Bushido However you cut it, Greek demagogues are bluffing that the faceless suits of Brussels will give in to the blackmail and fold their hand. Greeks are gamblers to start with, and some are even very good poker players. The tragedy is that the very same criminals who ruined the country to begin with are about to be re-elected on 17 June. The criminals, led by Antonis Samaras, have 27 per cent, the left-wing bluffer and con man Tsipras 25 per cent. Talk about Scylla and Charybdis! A couple of weeks ago I wrote that this Tsipras chappie who came in second and is running neck-and-neck with the so-called centre-right was an enemy of my class and background but that his hands were clean. Now some people tell me that I was being naive.

On board S/Y Bushido My moment of glory came and went in a jiffy, actually a whole afternoon of filming on board without a single retake, temper tantrum or the expected fight between the star, Alec Baldwin, and yours truly. The name of the movie is Seduced and Abandoned, and it has nothing to do with the Italian golden oldie. It is an original non-fiction story — the great Greek thespian Taki plays himself — of seeking funds for a movie among the labyrinthine circus of the Cannes film festival. Alec and James Toback also play themselves, as does the producer Michael Mailer. Now, as some of you may remember, I wrote about a totally different project, and how Alec and I would fight for real on the deck and both crash into the sea.

Miami Beach I thought it a good time to visit, neither spring break debauchery nor fashionista pretence time. So I signed up yet again for the judo championships, trained very hard and flew down with four buddies hoping to stay in a family hotel near the water, a bit like Bogie stopping at a place in Key Largo and running into Johnny Rocco, a crime tsar grown old and bitter and played by Edward G. Robinson. In that wonderful golden oldie, Claire Trevor played Rocco’s alcoholic mistress and portrayed the hooker as a sympathetic victim. (She also won the Academy Award for that role.) Well, I’ve got news for you. There are no hotels like the one in Key Largo left anywhere in Florida, no Claire Trevors and certainly no Bogies.

New York So, Sarko and Bruni are out, Hollande is in and I’m off to the Actor’s Studio to brush up on my acting lessons. (Stanley Kowalski is reborn. Stella!) I wonder whether DSK is thinking: ‘There but for an African maid go I.’ My friend Edward Jay Epstein has written a quickie book about Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s little problem of last year here in the Bagel, one in which Epstein reiterates the disgraced ex-IMF chief’s suspicions that he was set up by his political enemies. Epstein does not agree, he simply states Dominique’s case. Personally, I was delighted when the frog was busted, and it wasn’t simple schadenfreude either. (I am neither English nor that Greek.) DSK was simply a man wearing a suicide vest waiting to explode.

New York I have settled into my Bagel routine as if I had never been away: up early, a 25-minute walk through the park, one hour of judo working with three opponents, walk back, have breakfast and collapse with the newspapers. In the evening it is karate with Richard Amos and a couple of other black belts, then dinner at home. Three times per week I go out and get hammered in case I get too healthy, more often than not with Michael Mailer in the Boom Boom room, André Balazs’s downtown extravaganza. The women are mostly young, tall and thin, and much better than the men, except when either sex is Russian. Then they’re both awful.

The first friend I made at Lawrenceville School was called Reuben Batista, eldest son of the Cuban strongman. He was older and in a ‘Circle house’, whereas I was in lower school. Being foreigners gave us something in common, the rest of the school being mostly Wasps with a few Catholics thrown in for good measure. By the time I met Reuben in 1949 his father Fulgencio had been in power off and on for a couple of decades. Havana was a paradise if one was rich, liked easy women, rum drinks and flashy nightclubs and casinos. The ruling class was predominately white and of Spanish extraction, the poor underclass was mostly black with African roots.

New York Seeing Manhattan rising in the distance is always a treat. I am not sure it’s possible for anyone brought up around these parts to appreciate entirely what New York, the idea of New York, meant to us who came from the old continent. I was 11 years old and had seen only war and devastation. Dead, stinking bodies in the city parks, bullet-scarred buildings, people starving on the sidewalks, too weak to die in the privacy of their hovels. Then I was suddenly whisked from home and into a TWA first-class ‘stratocruiser’ stopping in Rome, Paris, London, Shannon, Gander, Boston and, finally, New York.

Papa Hemingway’s recently published letter to an Italian male friend revealed his human side, one all of his admirers were always aware of (like Bogie, tough on the outside, jelly on the inside). Until lately, Papa haters had a good long run. Soon after Carlos Baker’s matchless biography appeared around 1970, nine years after Hemingway’s suicide, the naysayers started to gnaw away at him. The rats were led by modernists, feminists and other such rubbish, the kind of non-talented, self-aggrandising phonies that have turned literature into the unreadable garbage that’s around today, especially in America. Papa’s straight, short, no-nonsense style didn’t suit them. Magic realism did. It hid their lack of talent.

Dr David Starkey is a great man, a Tudor historian, and one of the few academics who tells it like it is. Openly gay, he has no time for prancing queens and other such clown minorities trying to steal a bigger slice of the freebie pie. After last summer’s riots he had the courage to talk about a ‘violent, destructive, nihilistic gangster culture’ and how, as he put it, ‘the whites have become black’. All while politically correct policy-makers were hand-wringing about inequality and other such urban deprivation myths. He did not endear himself to the PC commissars, and that’s quite an understatement. PC, as intolerant a system of thought as the Salem trials, will simply never accept the truth.

The story thus far: in the 18 February issue of the greatest weekly in the world I wrote that I had fallen madly in love with Jessica Raine, the actress who portrays nurse Jenny in the Sunday-night BBC television show Call the Midwife. In the throes of demonic, erotic exhilaration, I may have piled it on a bit thick. So what? If Gordon Brown can ruin the British economy, Tony Blair take Britain to war based on an outrageous lie, and both bums still walk around without cuffs on their wrists, surely Taki can walk on air and fly on gossamer wings over someone he’s never met.